Although the entire world follows the soap opera of American politics, I somehow managed to remain blissfully ignorant of the current “partial government shutdown” until yesterday. Reviewing our travel plans for returning to the United States after seventeen years abroad, we’ve learned that, after a 9-hour flight from Europe and more than a week of waiting to see our dog, we can look forward to an 80% chance of missing our connection and having to stay the night in Chicago.

It seems that agents of the Transportation Security Administration, responsible for fondling old ladies and screening the dainties of the air traveling public in America, are not showing up for work, on account of not being paid, and that they are not being paid on account of the political volleyball that the two parties are playing with the Department of Homeland Security budget.

Believe it or not, fondling and dainties-screening are not at issue. Rather, TSA’s funding is being held hostage to the debate over the funding of a sibling agency. If the Transportation Security Administration reported to the Department of Transportation instead of to the Department of Homeland Security, there’s a good chance we’d only have to put up with the regular inconveniences of flying rather than waiting in long lines due to a shortage of uniformed gropers. But TSA is part of DHS, which is also the parent organization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency over which the budget battle lines have been drawn.

One side wants to end warrantless raids and the unadjudicated deportations of undocumented immigrants. The other argues that if we don’t halt and reverse the flow of illegal aliens who refuse to enter the country through the front door, we have no way of knowing what diseases and criminality we’re importing. One side accuses the opposition of wanting to flood the voting booths with non-citizens beholden to their political benefactors in the welfare state. The other decries their opponents’ campaign to frighten the nativists into supporting authoritarian measures that will keep them in power.

Each camp presents evidence that confirms their accusations, at least anecdotally. When the next election is likely to reverse the course of any investigation, proving systemic malfeasance is not only difficult; it is also beside the point. The point is counting coup, propagating an eschatological narrative before the cameras, amplifying it through the social media echo chamber, and ultimately corralling the rabble into one of two easily manipulated blocks of voters.

Scrupling over the funding of government agencies allows a politician to look principled while publicly excoriating his adversary for being unreasonable. It doesn’t matter which politician and which mob he is appealing to. The tactics are the same. The mob will get in line and follow his tune. In the zero sum world of modern ochlocracy, preventing the funding of one mob’s phobia is as important as funding the other mob’s rights.

Except, at some point, it all gets funded. Protests simmer down, headlines move elsewhere, and deals are made in private. Until then, travelers across the globe must endure another quarrel in Washington.

Meanwhile, as my wife and I make final preparations to migrate home from the Old World, I call to mind my great-grandfather’s emigration to Michigan. That generation of immigrants was promised nothing. They came anyway, and then they took the jobs of the natives whose services were overpriced. That is the American Way, as American as rioting against the immigrants coming after your job.

It causes me to wonder: If the federal government had no authority to promise anything to any constituency, which way would net migration go? World we still attract the sort who only want a chance to work, save, and provide opportunity for their children? If that is what we want, we certainly have made it more difficult to enter legally than when my great-grandfather came. Or, would the native-born, having grown accustomed to generations of government-sponsored incentives, join the exodus when the government’s money well inevitably runs dry?

I also wonder about the irritating possibility of missing my connection because of people not showing up to do a job I’d just as soon they not do at all.

When I left America, the whole bureaucratic apparatus known as Homeland Security was just maturing, created several years prior after nineteen lunatics with box cutters provoked the largest overreaction in American history (up to that time, at least). On the morning of that late summer day that “changed everything,” there were already bureaucracies and procedures in place when the lunatics slipped through them. In the after action reports, after all the speeches and congressional testimonies had finally concluded, the most useful lessons learned from the attack were the need to A) share information in a more timely manner among the sixteen agencies involved and B) reinforce the cockpit door and keep it locked. (It stands to reason that box cutters can’t endanger a flight if they can’t be applied to the pilot’s throat.)

But to make sure that box cutters never threatened our skies again, over the next ten years we increased our spending on military ordnance and hardware by 50%, adjusted for inflation, as compared to 13.5% percent on everything else. A few generals and admirals warned that expanding our high-tech weaponry would prove ineffective against our likely enemies, but saner voices were overruled in the race to hand out contracts to political donors, jobs to constituents, and capital gains to Wall Street insiders placing their bets on the arms industry.

Of course, terrorists don’t need to terrorize as much among a people that willingly imprisons itself at its own expense. Budgets ballooned for domestic surveillance and security; in fact, they more than doubled the first year after the September 11 attacks. This ushered in a massive consolidation of 22 agencies into the DHS alongside a radical expansion of new federal bodies like the TSA, the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, with its 80 “fusion centers” across the country that aggregate state and local law enforcement data into a continental dragnet of information on American citizens. Our borders have become a mesh of fortifications, with a Wall that could serve just as well to keep us in as to keep them out. Even the banking system was pressed into service with tighter reporting obligations and anti-money laundering procedures that require customers to justify transactions with their own deposits.

It would appear that when we crusaded abroad in undeclared wars to “fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,” we also turned the might of the state inward on ourselves, militarizing domestic protest responses, expanding warrantless surveillance, restricting our movements, requiring us to explain where we got our money and how we intend to spend it, renditioning suspects to secret camps abroad without habeus corpus or a hint of concern for due process, and subjecting the swarthier among us to show their papers on demand. To add insult to injury, it has all been saddled on the backs of our children’s children to pay for.

Given that the pretext for all this debt, war and diminishment of our freedom was to prevent a repeat of 9/11, we must never forget that one of those planes, United Flight 93 — aimed toward Washington, DC, perhaps toward the White House — never made its destination because the passengers aboard, learning the fate of three other flights that morning, overcame the hijackers and sacrificed themselves to bring the aircraft down before any more innocents were harmed.

What need have we of this Panopticon world we are building in a nation that has such brave and vigilant citizens? What further proof need be offered that a goon with government benefits could not possibly be more conscientious about the safety and security of a flight than the people who are boarding it?

Everyone wants safe flights, including pilots and flight attendants and fleet owners who don’t want to lose inventory, let alone customers (the dead ones are particularly bad for repeat business) -- and lawsuits. If paying customers want pre-boarding security measures, it can be included in the cost of the ticket without the non-flying taxpayer having to subsidize an army of compliance workers, without which the airlines would be forced to compete on safety in addition to routes, comfort, timeliness and price.

Our economy has been so grotesquely distorted by regulators protecting the very businesses they are supposed to be monitoring that we do not see the TSA for what it really is: a collusion of government and the airline industry to outsource the latter’s safety obligations. Profits remain private, but failures and liabilities that would otherwise eat into those profits are treated as a public grievance to be redressed at public expense. And increasing the public expense is the reason d’etre of government.

The two parties differ in how the public’s purse is purloined. Democrats, for the most part, would just expand the bureaucracy. Republicans would hire “private contractors” with government money. Either way, the body scanners at $200 thousand a piece don’t have to be paid for by the airlines that rely on them, and when it’s the taxpayer’s money being spent, no one really cares what the final cost is anyway.

In spite of the multi-generational mortgage we have taken on to pay for our safety, it is difficult to prove one way or another how successful the TSA has been. No one can measure how many lives were not lost because of its existence. Based on an undercover audit of the TSA conducted in 2015, however, we do know that 67 out of 70 testers posing as passengers were let through the security gates carrying prohibited weapons and explosives, a 95.7% rate of failure.

Perhaps the airport screeners were having a bad day, which is bound to happen when your paycheck depends on the demagogues in Congress agreeing to a compromise on immigration policy.

Olive, the family dog, is a European through and through, and has shown no enthusiasm for the repatriation of her humans to the United States. The noise and stir of gadgets being disassembled and boxes being packed arouses her from time to time to stand and sniff, but for the most part she prefers to keep her distance.

She has her reasons for being skeptical. In America, she will have no free university education or health care, and public transportation is practically non-existent.

I’ve tried to explain to her several times that the free stuff in Europe costs somebody something, and that truly free markets can provide just about anything imaginable at a lower total cost to both buyer and seller. That the problem in American markets is that, not only are they not free, but are among the most captive in history, or at least since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Alas, economics is not her strong suit, as is true of dogs generally, except perhaps for the Tyrolean Hound or the Austrian Pinscher.

Our timetable for moving has been far more hurried since we abandoned our plans to cruise home on Queen Mary II, the last true liner on the seven seas. The original idea was that, while the missus and I lounged about on the floating buffet with a round-the-clock happy hour, arriving at New York harbor refreshed and un-jet-lagged, Olive would hang with the pack in the kennel and remain the whole voyage at sea-level. This was a critical part of our travel plans, ever since I learned from a friend that dogs of her breed can explode at high altitudes.

I’ve since learned that it is not quite as dramatic as that, but short-nosed breeds have respiratory problems in the thinner atmospheres that can sometimes be fatal. To be fair, my friend might have stated it this way, and I simply misheard, preoccupied as I was with visions of high tea and low-stakes canasta on the HMS Who Cares, I’m Retired Now.

As I have accumulated over three months of annual leave (a veteran bureaucrat of more than thirty years, I learned long ago to take my vacations at work), the plan was that we would have time to relax, make a few excursions about the continent, and have our last Midsommar holiday in Sweden before returning to the New World. When I went to book our passage two months ago, there were still cabins available. The kennel, however, had a waiting list of eighteen months to two years.

“How was I supposed to know?”I replied to a wife beside herself with tears. “I didn’t even know I was going to retire eighteen months ago.” Several weeks have passed and I’m still perplexed that there evidently exists a subset of society so habituated to liner-travel that they know to schedule passage for their pets before their pets are even born. I was under the impression that the uber-rich have their own yachts, and set sail with whatever Siberian Tigers, Red-fronted Macaws, concubines and circus acts they feel like bringing aboard at the last minute. What’s the point of being rich, otherwise?

It turns out, fortunately, Lufthansa has a program for transporting dogs too large to fit beneath the seat in the passenger cabin, even Frenchies, in a pressurized, climate-controlled, and ventilated cargo hold. The caveat is that at no point on the journey can the tarmac be thirty degrees Celsius (eighty degrees Fahrenheit) or higher. She takes off in Gothenburg, Sweden, where, if it gets that hot at all, will not be before August. Frankfurt, Germany, where she transfers, is not guaranteed, but would probably be OK. Washington, DC, where she lands, is almost certain to be a tropical swamp before Memorial Day.

Hence the flurry of activity around the house that Olive is doing her best to ignore. Unbeknownst to her, she leaves for Gothenburg this morning and will arrive two days hence at Dulles International Airport, where my daughter has graciously agreed to pick her up and care for her until we arrive nine days following.

We are double- and triple-checking the paperwork. She will be travelling under her EU passport — a birthright that doesn’t transfer to me or my wife. Unconditional birthright citizenship for humans is offered by only thirty countries, none of them in Europe. This is a proof of US superiority I’d love to throw in the face of my liberal friends, were the American president not trying, against his usual instincts, to bring this policy in closer alignment with those of the countries he despises. Meanwhile, no nation on earth has established a path to citizenship for owners of “anchor dogs,” which could have made the difference in where we retired.

Olive has her vaccinations and all the CDC paperwork that must accompany her throughout the journey. We tucked some extra copies in her luggage in case she chews up the originals. She can be spiteful of bureaucracy, which is one of the reasons we didn’t take her seven months ago on the big haul of precious metals from our apartment in Sweden to a vaulting service in Delaware. One cross-eyed look at a customs agent and poof! They confiscate a sizable portion of our meager net worth.

Our adventures in not exactly smuggling gold and silver, but almost, must be saved for another time, perhaps tomorrow. Today, our concern is getting little Olive across the border safely — and legally. The outgoing Director of Homeland Security is famous for shooting her own dogs when they get out of line, so far be it for us to leave an i un-dotted or a t un-crossed when it comes to the immigration of ours, especially given that she is — I’m sorry that this even has to be mentioned in 2026 — a dog of color.

We’re now on the train to Gothenburg. Before boarding, we took her out for one last elimination in the town she grew up in. Of course, she sniffed meticulously for several minutes before picking her spot. She is not the type of girl to defecate just anywhere.

Again, thoroughly European.

After I left the army and resumed my studies in graduate school, I almost bankrupted my family writing a master’s thesis that was rightly rejected by my advisors the first time I submitted it. But instead of patching it here and there as my advisors suggested so that I could graduate a few months later in the summer, I dropped off the face of the earth, worked part-time, minimum wage jobs, and relied gratefully on my (first) wife’s income as a teacher to support us and our young children. I resurfaced several years later with a manuscript that eventually became published as The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment.

I won’t belabor the details which readers can find in the work itself, but I simply could not accept the suggestions of my advisors, based as they were on glaring logical contradictions promulgated for three generations by the textbook industry. So I spent hours that turned into months of digging through primary sources and following a trail of political writings that led all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. Again, I won’t re-argue my case here, but suffice to say, the professors of the Progressive Era who sat on my thesis committee were perplexed by my having to reach so far back to explain an amendment that was ratified in 1913.

At the time that I had completed my draft for re-submission, I chanced to be invited by a friend to accompany him on a warm October day to a gathering of Southern gentleman for mint-juleps and a discussion of affairs, with M.E. Bradford featured as the main speaker.

Full disclosure, although I was born in Atlanta, it was to parents who were both wanderers in their own right, who wandered to different destinies after their divorce, and raised me as a wanderer back and forth between them. Naturally, I continued to wander when I came of age. So even though I was technically born there, any affinity I have for the South is more by adoption, an outsider’s admiration, like that held by someone transplanted from New York or Pennsylvania or one of those other places where they serve unsweetened iced tea. I have always wished to share Bradford’s certainty about the sanctified inheritance of place, but living the life I have, anything I say on that topic is akin to reciting the Creeds as an agnostic who hopes them to be true.

Not being a lawyer, and having just read Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America, I naively asked Dr. Bradford if the Dred Scott decision was a case of judicial activism, inflicting slavery from the bench on States that didn’t want it. I don’t remember the entire tongue lashing that I received while a tent full of legally-trained Virginia good old boys glared at me for having such insolence. But I do remember the conclusion: that every time he came back East, M.E. Bradford made it a point to lay flowers on Justice Taney’s grave. Argumentum quia dixi!

So imagine my surprise, when discussing my thesis with perhaps the only two people at the gathering still willing to speak to me, the acquisitions editor of a university press appeared, gave me his card and asked me to send the manuscript. Long story short, when I let it circulate that my thesis was being considered for publication, my advisors stopped advising me to cut Rousseau out of my history of the Seventeenth Amendment, and I finally graduated.

It took many years and was far more difficult to get the work published than I had presumed, perhaps an instructive story to be chronicled at another time, but given the difficulty of getting my master’s degree in history, I made a half-hearted effort to apply for a PhD before deciding to spend the rest of my veteran’s educational benefits on a master’s degree in Library Science. I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as Library Practice, or Library Traditions, than “Science,” but they don’t give out master’s degrees for Practices and Traditions.

My thinking was that I could still hang around universities and do research without having to sing for my supper as an academic beholden to the political fads that inevitably underlie the main streams of university funding, which they did even thirty years ago, but far more so now. And while I always fancied myself corrupting the youth on the steps of the Agora, I am sure I dodged a bullet by not pursuing a career in the classroom. I retired yesterday as a librarian. As a professor I would have certainly blurted out something excommunicable long before I was eligible for my pension.

Despite being dragged kicking and screaming to the word processor (using floppy disks) during graduate school, and initially starting my library career as a manuscripts cataloger, it turns out I had a knack for automation and data management and an abhorrence of bottlenecks in organizational workflows. Just knowing anyone, anywhere was manually typing in information that had already been typed in somewhere else in the world would drive me to the whiteboard to diagram a better way, and if it took me two months to automate ten minutes of data entry, I considered it time well spent. It was therefore a natural transition from manuscripts cataloger to systems librarian, which tended to pay better.

I am sure to write eventually in greater detail about leaving the United States and a job as systems librarian in a prestigious university to take the position of head librarian at a small university that few people outside the maritime world have ever heard of. For now, let’s put it down to mid-life ennui: grown kids, divorce, a new marriage, and a congenital inability to torture the meaning of words and mouth the pieties required of managers at the senior level. Having automated or delegated virtually every task in my job at the time, if I wasn’t going up in the organization, the choice was stagnate or quit.

Undoubtedly, I will also have a thing or two to say about working the last seventeen years for a university in the orbit of the United Nations. I have frequently imagined some goat herder peacefully tending his flock as a truck pulls up. A squad of soldiers emerges, turns him upside down, and shakes out his loose change, which by processes outlined in various treaties and memoranda of understanding ends up in my monthly paycheck. I always wince at the thought, but it has inspired me at least to build the best collections at the lowest costs with minimal staffing, and to train our students, mostly from “developing nations” (as opposed to “declining nations”) in how to use the awesome tools of research at their disposal — courtesy of the anonymous goat herder.

So much of my work in library automation was inspired by an urge to reform the slow, tedious processes available when I was researching The Road to Mass Democracy, that, as I sit at the keyboard a day after retiring, I wonder if my library career was just one giant era of procrastination before getting on with my writing. I had obtained the domain name, dailyconstitutional.com, in the late nineties or early aughts, with the intention of writing much more prolifically. Since then I have only managed a second edition of the book and a few articles, all of which were published elsewhere, and a couple poems — published by whom? I can’t remember.

Now that I find myself with an extra forty hours a week on my hands, I hope to make up a little of the lost time. Aside from bureaucratic memos and “strategic planning” documents, my only writing experience is a book and a few long scholarly articles that were accomplished for the most part decades ago. Such writing is slow and tedious trench work that doesn’t allow an author to come up for air that frequently. I have a few of those projects on my to-do list, God willing. But I suspect I also have a knack for the editorial, the satirical, the polemical, and the shorter forms of essay that just might be suitable for a web site called The Daily Constitutional.

It will take practice and will power to keep it short (This introduction is already too long, but it still hasn’t taken more than a day to write, so it counts).

As the title suggests, it will be a daily rumination or mental walk about whatever is chapping my hide or tickling my funny bone. A few days back on the walk to work I passed a man down on one knee, trying to comfort his toddler daughter. She was crying inconsolably over what I realized, as I came closer, was a split open carton of milk that had splattered all over the sidewalk. I didn’t come close enough to hear if the father was passing on the ancient wisdom, the same in Swedish as it is in English, "Man ska inte gråta över spilld mjölk."

As there was nothing I could do to help, I walked away laughing. Surely there’s something to write about in the literal enactment of a proverb.

Well, let’s see where this goes.

Approximately two weeks ago, Oliver Anthony rose in a matter of days from a songwriter no one had ever heard of to the most streamed and downloaded musician on the internet. He owes this immaculate ascension to the chord he struck with tens of millions of listeners who feel the wretchedness of a world run by the villains in his hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Like lightning sparking dry tinder in a drought-stricken forest, Anthony’s powerful lyrics, powerfully delivered, started a word-of-mouth publicity phenomenon the “music industry” could not even dream of.

Not surprisingly, the corporate media has largely dismissed the song as “racist,” “punching down,” stereotyping welfare queens, and our favorite, “fat-phobic.” It’s a doggerel “dog whistle,” a right-wing “screed,” a “Republican anthem.”

It is true that celebrity conservatives have been outspoken in their praise, while progressive notables have been fairly consistent in their obloquy. But thousands of YouTube “reaction videos,” each with hundreds of comments, attest to the song’s popularity across ethnic and racial lines, and even national boundaries, among both of the two main genders, and many of the rank and file along the whole continuum of political leanings. The disdain from news organs that typically defend the political class in Washington, a.k.a, the Rich Men North of Richmond, as contrasted with the overwhelmingly heartfelt approval of fans from all walks of life, gives credence to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s observation that today’s politics is not about “‘left v. right’ so much as ‘pro v. anti-establishment.’”

The review by National Review Online’s Executive Editor, Mark Antonio Wright, is particularly noteworthy for being a criticism from the right (Those of us accustomed to thinking of the right-left division between monarchists and regicides in l'États généraux have never been at home with modern American usage, but for the sake of this discussion, it will have to do ). It is not difficult to imagine the torrent of epithets and vitriol he evoked after publishing his 14 August review of “Oliver Anthony’s Fuzzy Lament.” In it, Mr. Write lavished praise for the artistry and passion in Anthony’s meteoric bluegrass sensation, but expressed his consternation with “the adulation on the right for this song’s message” Wright begins his criticism with the opening (and closing) lines:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

The song only gets sadder from there, as Anthony mournfully sings of a nation in decline. The signs are everywhere: morbidly obese people on the dole, hungry people in the street, suicidal despair, and a class of rich, privileged rulers having no accountability for themselves, yet grasping for ever greater control over everyone else.

What incited the furor against him was Wright’s recommendation that Anthony sober up and find better paying employment. In fact, he dismissed all of the songwriter’s complaints as being basically fixable for anyone willing to confront them. Readers responded with an online pelting, charging him with being snobbishly out of touch with ordinary Americans, i.e., being pro-establishment. The following day he doubled down with a defense of his original position in an article entitled “It’s Not Condescending to Speak the Truth.” There he offered his workingman bona fides:

For the record, I’m not a rich man living north of Richmond. I’m an Okie, living in my hometown. I was raised in a middle-class family. I worked my way through college. I mowed lawns, built fences, and stood the closing shift at a convenience store. After school, I roughnecked in the west Texas oilfields for two years to pay off my student loans. Later, I joined the Marine Corps and served in the infantry. I’ve followed work to four different states and moved my family three times in seven years. My hands are rough and calloused. I know blue-collar work and what it’s like to make ends meet on blue-collar pay.

To give him his due, Wright at least acknowledges the destructive forces of Washington in what he considers Anthony’s otherwise “fuzzy lament”:

I’m neither callous nor indifferent to the suffering out there. I’m not attacking Oliver Anthony personally or disparaging his character. Indeed, I called the epidemic of overdoses, suicides, and deaths of despair a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” And, as I wrote, I don’t think that the federal government or our national leadership has been an innocent bystander in any of this. Of course the government has wasted avalanches of money, stoked inflation, and made it harder for your dollar to stretch to the end of the month.

But he gives it short shrift. “You won’t convince me that the first-, second-, and third-most important factors in the fracturing of our society hasn’t been — us. We the People have been the cause of our decline.”

In the Panglossian world of a National Review editor, if “you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’” the solution is simple: stop blaming others, and get to work on improving your situation. Instead of just complaining, Mr. Anthony “should consider singing about what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success.”

Of course, Wright is not wrong in insisting that we are each responsible for our own well-being. That is the indispensable foundation of self-government. But collectively, self-governing individuals also require a regime of laws to which they give their consent, and which equally bind those who, through supposedly free and fair elections, have been delegated the authority to enforce them. Both governors and the governed must adhere to the rule of law.

The Rich Men North of Richmond behave as if they are under no such compunction. They are above the law, living prodigally without consequence, courtesy of the taxpayer. There are even plausible rumors that the most power drunk among them indulge in a sick appetite for children — of which Anthony unflinchingly accuses them: “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.”

Wright passes over this sinister pun without comment, while insisting that we, “as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and popular culture.” It’s a matter of getting on “with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.”

If Write, as he claims, is not being condescending, it is hard to imagine how his criticism could be more tone-deaf. It is emphatically the elements of the good life that are under threat by the Rich Men North of Richmond, and it is getting too obvious to ignore:

Lord knows, they all just want to have total control,
Want to know what you think, want to know what you do,
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do.

And how does Anthony know that you know? Because of the twin injustices which even the dullest of peasants inevitably can see for themselves, inflation and oppressive taxation. The song expresses the situation with raw clarity: “Yer dollar ain’t shit, and it’s taxed to no end.”

The lyricist’s crude words belie a subtly meticulous wording, to wit, your paycheck is already worthless before it gets taxed. He could have written that it’s worthless because it gets taxed, but “and it’s taxed to no end” adds a further humiliation, delivering the kick to the man who’s already down. Those who might argue that the working man doesn’t pay as much in our progressive tax scheme (as if handing over 20 or 25 percent to the imperial treasury is no small matter) are of course only thinking in terms of income. In fact, if he pays rent, he pays his landlord’s taxes. When he buys groceries, the price includes the per-item taxes on the farmer’s crop sales, the transporter’s gasoline, the grocer’s profits and the margins of anyone providing value along the whole train of transactions. This is on top of the quarter of his earnings he has already surrendered.

What is the point of a better paying job if ever increasing portions of one’s income are, directly or indirectly, surrendered to the taxman?

And what is the point of being employed at all if one’s compensation is in Federal Reserve Notes which the world since 1971 mistakenly refers to as “dollars?”

From the founding until the Nixon presidency, the dollar was always defined as a weight of gold, or gold and silver. It’s still on the books at $42.22 per troy ounce of fine gold, but only because no subsequent Congress has dared declare on paper what it is in practice, a fiat currency backed by nothing but the full-faith and credit of its issuer. Instead of the “Note” being backed by gold, for which it once served as a convenient, but redeemable, substitute, the assets now backing our circulating currency are US Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities. In other words, the fiat dollar is an IOU for more debt.

Once set free from a commodity not easily accumulated, the Rich Men North of Richmond could conjure these so-called dollars at will for expenditures well beyond what rapacious revenuers could squeeze out of their blood dry subjects.

But free money is never free. To the wage earner, money is a token of the time and energy that was required to earn it. To the saver, it is a backdated claim on the needs and pleasures that have been forsworn today for the uses and gratifications that can be enjoyed tomorrow. Money extends the realm over which labor can be divided, with each participant earning and storing the value he adds to the world’s wealth in a medium he can exchange for the products and services provided by others; it is pursued almost instinctively by self-governing people as a means of ensuring their freedom from want and adversity in the future. But when it is diluted with counterfeit tokens for which no labor was committed, when the claims of savers are crowded out by the claims of forgers, those actually contributing to the overall stock of wealth have their time stolen and the value of their labor diminished for the the benefit of the government, its favored interests, and its growing ranks of plebeian dependents.

If intentions may be deduced from results, making us all dependent would seem to be the goal. If every dollar is itself a debt, backed by nothing but debts that citizens are expected to repay, the ruin of the average wage worker gets closer with every dollar earned. The paycheck he depends on to keep him and his family afloat is also the millstone around his neck that eventually will drown him along with his countrymen. And he has no choice. By the law of the land he must accept as payment, and vainly try to save, the legal tender in which his property and all his economic transactions are taxed, while the purchasing power of his time and labor dwindles toward nothing. Even in what is left of the so-called private sector, he works for the state, for the Rich Men North of Richmond.

In his second attempt to explain his position, Wright takes issue with a critic to his original article who points to the decline in real wages for those at the bottom. “That’s a debatable assertion at best,” he contends, referencing but not elaborating on Michael Strain’s book, The American Dream Is Not Dead. He cites data from the US Chamber of Commerce regarding unfilled jobs and the shortage of skilled workers. For those without skills, Write helpfully suggests joining the military and shipping off to boot camp.

Whatever statistics that academicians and corporate lobbying associations might produce as proof that Americans are living in the best of times, the rest of us go to the grocery store and see fewer goods for sale, at higher prices, in smaller packages. House prices have never been higher relative to income. Practically anyone not generating gains from inflated financial assets is falling behind, out of savings and further in debt. And with scores of thousands of rules and regulations obstructing economic decision-making in every direction, opting out to start a business — the original American dream — is increasingly less attractive.

To the tone-deaf critic who assures us America has never seen better days, that life-changing improvements are merely a pay raise away, the only consideration is the quantity, not the quality, of the money being used in payment. But a single example suffices to show that our dollar “ain’t shit” compared to what it used to be. When President Johnson ordered the removal of silver from US coinage in 1965, the minimum wage was $1.25 — five quarters. The silver contained in five quarters already in circulation at that time, those minted in 1964 or earlier, would, as of this writing, command a melt value of $21. If and when silver is once again demanded as a monetary metal, it will take far more than twenty-one of today’s shitty dollars to buy those “junk silver” coins of yesteryear.

Thus, it is beyond dispute that, measured against real money, real wages have declined, and with them, the freedom of citizens trapped in the legal tender regime that borrows, spends, taxes and inflates away the fruits of their labor. “Give me control of a nation’s money supply,” Mayer Amschel Rothschild is alleged to have said, “and I care not who makes its laws.” With the coming launch of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CDBC), programmable fiat dollars can direct credit toward politically favored projects, attach expiration dates to prohibit savings, and deny spending on the part of anyone suspected of “conspiracy”, “misinformation” or showing insufficient hatred against the enemy du jour. With one’s ability to buy and sell made contingent on cooperativeness and social credit score, centralized control in this dystopian nightmare will be close to total. They will know what you think and know what you do.

A pervasive feeling of futility explains, at least partially, the nation’s rising rate of suicides, a damning bombshell Anthony delivers at the song’s crescendo. Not surprisingly, Wright retorts, “the tragedy of young men killing themselves through drink or drugs — the catastrophe of deaths of despair” is not Washington’s fault. To be sure, in that slow march of desperation, the taking of one’s own life — the final step from which there is no coming back — is always an individual choice. But given the dramatic uptick in the number of Americans resorting to this fatal decision, particularly among one demographic, it is not unreasonable to suggest some of the blame might be laid on a legal and social environment that is indifferent, if not hostile, to their continued existence. The songwriter is considerably less equivocal:

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet under ground
’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.

In suggesting the regime’s culpability in the self-destruction of its young men, it is important to note that the narrator has not taken that course himself. He is still standing, defiantly roaring his protest. Even more so must we make the distinction between the narrator’s words and the stated beliefs of the songwriter who wrote them, the distinction between the art and the artist. In his self-recorded introduction to the song, Oliver Anthony remarks, “This life is a beautiful opportunity, and I don’t care where you are or what you’ve done, where you think your life is heading. Everything can change in a moment. As long as you’re above the dirt, you’ve got a fightin’ chance.”

Antonio Wright’s criticism fails to make these distinctions. He therefore misinterprets the song as a dirge of hopelessness rather than an anthem of revolt against powerful people who no longer even try to hide their tyranny. For every complaint in the song, Wright has a practical solution. He betrays the less than helpful attitude of the husband who doesn’t understand that his wife isn’t asking him to provide a solution. She just wants to be heard.

Although he does not specifically address Anthony’s line, “We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,” we can assume he takes issue with it on the grounds that just about anyone can work his way out of that predicament, if he so chooses. Undoubtedly, the downward trail that leads to sleeping on grates follows many of what the grackles in the self-help industry term “bad personal decisions.” In most cases Mr. Wright’s universal prescription to pick up one’s life and make oneself useful is precisely what the doctor should order. But putting the line within the context of the rest of the verse reveals a larger complaint about which the striving, self-reliant, can-do American has no means of redress:

We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,
and the obese milking welfare.
Well God! If you're five foot three and weigh three hundred pounds
taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.

The lyrics don’t say whether those folks in the street are starving because of government action, or its inaction, but they do point out the glaring discrepancy between the alleged aims of government’s humanitarian programs and their obscene results. Adding insult to injury, anyone who has a job, especially a high paying one such as Wright recommends, is underwriting this obscenity without having any say in the matter. We wonder what he would recommend to the farmers forced to quarter troops in Sam Adam’s day. Perhaps: “Grow more crops, and then you can afford a bigger house.”

The reason this song has received such world wide attention and “adulation” — from all quarters, not just from the right — is its resonance with everyday people experiencing these systemic obstacles and roadblocks to their pursuit of happiness. The compliance and the workarounds are increasingly more time-consuming, less effective and are grinding them down. Finally, somebody has stood up and called “bullshit” on the whole authoritarian establishment

Write’s mistake is in seeing Mr. Anthony’s song as simply a catalog of things gone wrong, a consignment of blame and, by implication, a cry for some sort of amelioration. It is Write’s inference that is dead wrong. There is nothing to indicate that Mr. Anthony is appealing to government for anything, except for it to lift its boot off the neck “of people like you, and people like me.”

Whether in the form of ninety-nine theses nailed to the church door, or a declaration of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” dispatched to the monarch reigning overseas, revolutions begin with a catalog of grievances against the current order. The list eventually destined for the Capitol will be considerably longer. Rough lyrics will be rephrased with legal precision. But thanks to Oliver Anthony, the Rich Men North of Richmond are on notice that it is coming.